What a ByHuman badge really means.

ByHuman is not an AI detector. It does not analyze a finished video to guess whether AI made it — that approach is a losing arms race. Instead, ByHuman asks the creator to publicly attest and disclose how the video was made, tied to their verified YouTube channel and timestamped via the public Bitcoin blockchain.

The skeptical reader gets three things to scrutinize: a verified channel owner staking their reputation on a public claim, a structured disclosure of what was and wasn't AI in the pipeline, and a Bitcoin-anchored hash of the original file proving when it existed.

Three things, nothing more.

• Channel ownership. The Google account signing the badge owns the YouTube channel that posted the video, verified through Google OAuth and the YouTube Data API.
• Public attestation. The channel owner publicly stated the video was made by a human and disclosed which parts of the pipeline were human-made vs. AI-assisted.
• Bitcoin-anchored timestamp. ByHuman computed a SHA-256 of the video file the creator uploaded and anchored that hash to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps. Anyone can verify the .ots proof against the Bitcoin chain themselves.

What this isn't.

• We did not biometrically verify the voice. A motivated creator could clone a real voice with AI and still pass Silver. Gold tier closes this gap with live capture and voice-print matching.
• We did not scan the video frame-by-frame for AI artifacts. That fight goes to whoever ships the next model.
• We did notverify the disclosure is truthful — it's a public attestation, with consequences if proven false (see reports).

Why Bitcoin?

When a badge is minted, ByHuman submits the file's SHA-256 hash to OpenTimestamps calendar servers. Within hours, that hash is committed inside a Bitcoin block, giving us a publicly auditable timestamp. Anyone can verify the .ots proof against the Bitcoin blockchain — ByHuman is not in the trust path for the timestamp itself.

This matters for the same reason notarial seals do: the witness shouldn't depend on us. If ByHuman disappears tomorrow, the timestamps remain verifiable.

Three commands. That's it.

1. Download the .ots proof from the badge page — link surfaced in the proof page footer.
2. Install the OpenTimestamps CLI: pip install opentimestamps-client.
3. Run ots verify badge.ots against the original video file. The CLI reports the Bitcoin block height the hash is anchored in.

What happens if someone lies.

Anyone can report a badge they believe misrepresents itself, using the “Report this badge” link in the proof page footer. ByHuman reviews each report. If a Silver badge is proven to be AI-narrated or materially fabricated, we publicly revoke it: the proof page is replaced with a revocation notice that preserves the original badge metadata for transparency.

Repeat or egregious cases lead to channel-wide revocation and a public listing.

Live capture & voice-print.

Gold creators install the ByHuman Companion desktop app, which captures their voiceover session at recording time. We compare the published video's voice against both the captured session and an enrolled voice-print, and the creator passes a one-time identity verification. Gold ships when Silver hits adoption traction.